German Pop and Gender Issues

August 10, 2017

Featured Image: Max Giesinger_(c)Klaus Sahm

My kids grew up and developed their music taste from Backe Backe Kuchen to Ich bin keine Maschine, a german pop ear worm playing on repeat in my daughter´s bedroom. This would be kind of cute if she wouldn´t have been “only” 8 years old, and I still remember the day when she did her first steps and we clapped our hands like in “when you happy and you know it, clap your hands”. That was yesterday! Today we are fighting about the music. If I hear Ich bin keine Maschine once again, she´s going to the boarding school. Seriously! Except that I will miss falling in love with cute german blondies who roll RRRRR and play guitar. Kitsch? Hell yeah, but a lively one. Tim Bendzko sings from my heart, as I´ve just left the corporate world, where people were seriously getting annoyed with me when I was expressing my opinion that following the SOPs (standard operating procedures, you wacko) is not really, you know, human. Bye bye, babes. See you in another life. I go to fight against and for my kid´s music taste. The boarding school can wait ;-).

So, wanting it or not, over night I became a german pop fan and devoted creator of very, well, creative Spotify lists “deutsche pop Zoe & Henri” and similar. Let me then share with you my surprise, when I discovered this two magnificent gender songs in it! We call it Mama Lied and Papa Lied. And so it is.

Despite being a tongue in cheek metaphor of the way we handle our days, it does raise the big question of what we bring across to the next generation? Is this the model that we want to convey? Is this how we want to live? Haven´t our mothers envision something better for us, and we something different for our kids?

I challenge you, all of you, socially conscious mothers of Germany, you emancipated, hard working beasts, with your Alnatura Baby Food, and swaying ghosts of your 68er mothers throwing their bras in the air, where are your voices now? I dare you, as I dare myself, to think and to refuse to follow our global corporations socially imposed SOPs. I dare you to invent different life and business models than yours and mine 50 hours working week and a man who first needs to save the world before he comes to you!